City of Bloomington, Illinois City Council Meetings, 26 Jan 2015

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From YouTube: January 26, 2015 - City Council Work Session

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January 26, 2015 - City Council Work Session
http://www.cityblm.org

View meeting documentation:
http://www.cityblm.org/index.aspx?page=17&recordid=3205
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A

A

B

If you get, everybody could take a seat. Please.

B

I'm going to go ahead and call the meeting of the Bloomington city council work session to order, madam clerk, would you call the roll please.

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D

C

Manila huawei cute Holloman stern here all them in painter here: alderman Schmidt, you're,.

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C

Them in black yeah Osman Hellman here all them in freuen, your Mariner here.

B

Thank you very much and we're going to start to see if they're a public comment on the this work session. At this point, you know we didn't have any cards. Okay, thank you. We'll move right along to the presentation and just to clarify this was meant to basically begin to clarify the issues that we have in front of us and possibilities. Justice was not meant, basically in 20 minutes to be a definitive beginning and end all just this is some initial information.

B

If we've got time for some initial reactions great, but then we're obviously going to be thinking about this talk to our constituents and talking to people, the mayoral, open houses and whatever and move forward so anyway, I will go ahead and turn it over to our city manager. Compare.

D

If I can just add to that, I think the greatest question the council or is staff and myself for seeking tonight is how do you want to proceed? Do you want to our have you feel like you've received enough information from staff and the public now that we've completed an online budget survey, citizens summit, so at this point in time, staff you know more than anything is trying to understand.

D

When would you like to move in the direction of making the decision one way or another or among many options, or do you need more information or just want more time, as the mayor said talking with constituents, so we're looking for a little clear direction as to when you want to bring this back for formal action by the council or, and is there anything you want prior to that from city staff or the public? So with that, let's we're just going to have Steve Rasmussen assistant city manager.

D

Take a few minutes and just give a few highlights on the information you have in the packet and then we'll turn it back to you for your discussion, then Steve you want to go ahead. Okay, thank.

E

You very much and I'm going to ask steve Arnie to help me with the slides here. So I can point to some things on it. We have 20 minutes I'm only going to take about 10 minutes if I can to allow all of you. A few moments discuss this and before we go into it.

E

I'd like to say three quick things number one I'd like to thank the people that had been have been working on this for about the last month in great detail: the finance department, patty Lynn and her people laura, has helped a great deal on that. Steve Arnie and Jim karch in the public works department, and then some people down there in in the Solid Waste has also helped I'd like to recognize George coots and his people who've. Also given some invaluable insight into what goes on out.

D

There, because.

E

They're, the ones out there every day, picking things up, and so they have good insight into what people habits are. Could you give me that first slide, please, these slides that you have today are a little bit than what you may have gotten earlier, because we keep going through these every day and keeping on working on these and refining them, and up here what I said in the first out there is. The purpose of tonight's briefing is to may try to help, make the enterprise fund balance and the word balance.

E

There is a verb, not a noun. It's not the fund balance. We want to make this this enterprise fund balance. If we can, several years ago, the council decided to make solid waste an Enterprise Fund, which means that the expenditures and the fund shouldn't exceed the money that it takes in this stage, the game we haven't been able to achieve that. So then I'll talk a little bit about the 2015 performance, which we still have yet to finish out and then, of course, the important thing is.

E

What do we do to balance this fund in the 2016 budget, which will have to put together here very shortly and then I I? Have some recommendations and I want to point out that these recommendations are my recommendations? I chaired the working group from the staff that put this together and I wanted to make sure that the staff came back to you with a recommendation. One thing about the recommendation for sure is: I'm sure that's not where you will end up, but we have an obligation to give you something other than just say.

E

This is a tough problem. It's your problem! Now, so what we did was we gave you the best technical data that we could so it forms a starting place from you to make these tough political decisions that you'll have to make and what we've given you here is as much information as we can to go forward. Okay, Steve, there's the key issue up on the left hand side you see, the in red is the such as solid waste services for 2016, but we anticipate was.

E

This fund will be two and a half million dollars in deficit. What happens is in solid waste, the total expense is eight million dollars, and what we make is five and a half million dollars that makes us 202 and a half million dollars short. So you can do one of two things, one you can subsidize it, but subsidized is kind of a misnomer.

E

It's not like there's a magic pot to bring that money out of somewhere the way you subsidize it is subsidized it from some other tax fund, like property tax fund or what you can do is not bring it from somewhere else and make some changes within the fund like increase the charges to customers on bulk or you can decrease bulk services or, as you see on that list, some combination of those things to make the fund balance without taking money from somewhere else and we'll go through those a little bit, because I want to show you that the data that you'll be able to deal with okay now this chart shows the actual work in solid waste, and these figures are not representative their actual figures.

E

So if you look up there in bulk and brush each one of those, those those figures represents a person, so there are 21 employees there and they're divided up into three crews, and each crew has four trucks and a bucket loader. So that's the actual number of people you have there in garbage and recycling which we pick up with the carts. You also have represented there, the actual number, so you have 11 employees with 11 trucks there.

E

It only takes one employee driving one truck because their automated and they can lift the trash now what's important about this slide, is to recognize that the top half of that represents sixty percent of the expenses of running the fund on the bottom garbage and recycling represents only forty percent of it, but on the bottom, the forty percent garbage and recycling produces all of the income we only charge for carts, so the five and a half million dollars that we get comes from garbage and recycling.

E

We do not charge for anything on the top, and so you can see sixty percent of the work that we do. We don't receive any income from, and garbage and recycling supports all of it, but not completely. It only supports five and a half million dollars of the eight million dollars with the fun costs.

E

Okay, Steve now I also want to remind you, though, that the people in solid waste do some other things. So if you look up here, you see that we also have a street sweeping people from solid waste. Do the street sweeping they also run the drop-off center, so there's one or two people in the drop-off center every day and then during the leaf periods of time. There are also the people that are out there, driving the leaf suckers and right today, you may well note we have some of our people out tonight.

E

They also do snow and ice removal, so those people do a multitude of things, as well as just solid waste depending upon what the need is required, and that requires some careful management. Okay, now here's the tough slide and it looks very busy and it's the one that you're going to be able to work with the most. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go through one or two lines on this, just to show you how it works every time we say well, what could we do?

E

We come up with some options and people say well what, if we did this okay, we put that down as an option and we run out the projection so.

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You see here is in the columns on the left column in the in the middle. You see fiscal year 2015, and that is what we project is going to happen this year. Then the next one we say 2016 budget and then skip over call them. We say 2017, so we run these out to show what it looks like. But now I'll take a look at one and so over on the far left-hand side. You see option a it says, make no change.

E

So if you run that over and I circle that for emphasis- but it amounts to in parenthesis- you have a deficit for the 2016 year budget of two and a half million dollars. Now we ran all of these different options because everyone who looks at it says- but maybe we could just do this- we say great. We run that out and take a look at what it looks like what I've done, though, in the in the orange circles, I've circled the ones that actually work.

E

The reason I say that it's not really a viable option if it doesn't solve the problem. I've circled, all of the ones that get us within plus or minus of a half a million dollars. A budget of balancing the fund we get to within a half a million dollars of balancing the fund. That's well within the probability of error, because we're just projecting might have what happened in the future and I'll. Give you a couple of examples of that.

E

If you look down there, for example, and you look at one like option, C to the first one, that's in a circle charged 75 dollars for every bucket. Okay, then you go over to the 2016 column, and you see there were only eighteen thousand dollars in arrears. That works pretty good, but $75 is a pretty stiff hip for every bucket. If you go down to another one, for example, let's go down to e to the third circle down. You could charge every customer a flat rate of thirty dollars, but whatever size cart they get well.

E

You could do that. Some people think that would work and that ends up well to the positive, except what you're doing is you have people who aren't using the bulk waste subsidizing the both ways? So the answer here has got to be some combination there that the public and that you are comfortable with now. What I've done is I've put in a black circle, the other circle down there, which is 495 dollars.

E

We call that option g1 and that says, charge twenty-five dollars for every bucket loader with a great structure, but also then assumes a 50 /.

E

The reason for that is, if you charge twenty-five dollars for every pick up, you will probably get less hiccups, because people will figure out how to do that. You'll only have it picked up every other week or you'll share one with your neighbor. So what happens? Is you?

E

You increase the charge there by a little bit, but it helped produce an efficiency in the system and what that does it means then you'll have to have less cost and you'll get more income, and that's why we get to within four hundred ninety five thousand dollars under that projection. Now it assumes a fifty fifty percent, less bulk pickup. Where did I get that number? Well, that's an educated guess we all work together. We saw what will happen, and so we talked amongst ourselves. We asked people and we took a guess at that.

E

We don't know what that'll be, but if we choose to do something like that in three or four months, we'll know exactly what it is. If it's right, we could emphasize it. If it's wrong, we can go back, something we don't know until we try, but we made an assumption there. So that's how this chart works and I'm sure that every one of you can come up with another option and I'll I'll put 10 more options on there for you for the next time we get together. Okay, okay,.

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E

Now I said: I'd cut, recommendations and I've got several here. Number one is the cart charges we found out that when we included a smaller chart, cart at a smaller cost. Many people went to the smaller cart. We didn't get any more money by raising the cart fees. So what we're proposing is freeze the cart size under this option. The cart you've got now is the cart.

E

You've got and then the cart you get is depending on the size of people in your household, the more people in the household, the bigger cart you've got, and that would tend to reduce the fact that you would have a 35, gallon cart and then all kinds of extra legs and everything hanging off of it. When you really needed a 65 gallon card and with the charge all new customers sixty dollars, so they buy the cart. To begin with, there is a human nature to that. That will not give much credibility.

E

Those things you get free if you pay sixty dollars per cart, that for cart and you take care of the second thing we proposed, and this is what we call option g1 and that is charging $25 for every bucket load and what we were hoping there is that what that does is it does not cause a great deal of expense to everyone, but it helps produce enough and then down at the third option, said subsidize waste by five hundred thousand dollars.

E

You look at number two that works pretty, but you see it still gets us five hundred thousand dollars short well. Where do you get that? Well, it has to come from somewhere and there are a number place.

E

You come from one of the things that can come from the general fund reserve, but that money has to come from somewhere, there's no money in there and you don't want to take that money to lower the reserve, so you have to put it back in and so just as an example, I said: what does it take thousand dollars? Well, 1 million dollars you get from the average household by raising the cost thirteen dollars a year.

E

If you raised property tax by thirteen dollars a year for every for the average house, it gets you a million dollars, so seven dollars or 66 a month, sixty cents up on the property tax, get you that extra 500,000. Now, I'm not I'm not suggesting that.

E

That's the only option, I'm just showing you how this works so that, as you go through it as you look at what you want to add how you want to cut it up, how you want to slice it and dice it that gives you an example of how some of these things might come together and then the next slide is for what happens. Is this will cause the market to determine the service level? You will have less pick up because you'll have less, you have more expense to do it. Maybe, but what happens then?

E

We'll have less people that will be working in this and what I've shown by those arrows is those individuals that then will not be doing solid waste, because we have a less need for it and thus save money in the solid waste fund. They can go over the public works in parks and recreation, I'm currently sitting on seven or eight or nine vacancies, and that number varies from data.

E

They have critical positions, we have to fill in those other departments in 2016, and so we could use some of these experienced skilled employees that are now in solid waste that could go over and move some and fill some of those critical positions in the other department that we so desperately need to fill and the market would determine that. We can't exactly tell what it would look like now, but.

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E

Know soon enough, as we change the process and then five, we can also explore some other efficiencies. One of the things is, we could use the knuckle boom trucks to lift up the solid waste. Of course, when you do that it doesn't lift up everything. Somebody still has to get out by hand and sweep some things. They currently cost about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

E

So if we're trying to reduce the expense in the fund, we can't reduce the fund by buying a bunch, more equipment floor that and maybe get one to put in there and see what kind of an efficiency we would get there and also.

E

Then, if we reduce the amount of pick up, but we've got one of the things that would happen is that we could use a call in and just call in when you want us to pick it up and then we could come out and pick up the location rather than running everybody on all of the roots. Okay, Steve I think that's our last slide. Okay,.

B

Well, we're really running tight here, Steve and then I know you needed to walk us through what all this was and obviously we're not going to be able to make any decisions right now we were supposed to start township in just a couple minutes. I'll ask if I've got one or two very quick. If we at this point, maybe just questions rather than statements from the council, so we can at least begin to take a look at this digest.

B

This bring us bring this back to some of our constituents, get some reactions all of the middle Huawei sure.

F

He'll, oh I'm, sorry, first, ok, ok, I see on slide number.

F

The busy one you don't have an option for fifty dollars. Yeah.

E

Yes, that's right. We just went from 25 to 75 and we went halfway in between that. That would be 50. But if you'd like I'll, run 50 out and show you what it looks like sure.

F

And then I also would like to know what the composition of the committee was in terms of and I'm, not looking for names I'm. Looking.

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F

No functions that.

E

Was not a by any means of citizens, committee or elected officials? It was the people I mentioned before. It was financed and Public Works and we asked for some input from the people from solid waste and I chaired that committee. So so these recommendations, I synthesized that and so those would be my recommendations as the chairman of that group.

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B

H

Them in black and then the sage Thank You mr. mayor, and thank you Steve for that presentation. What am I take away from this isn't someone is that we need to do a better job of educating the public on on some of the challenges that we face. My question would be: what is the timeline? Look like I know. We want to take this back to our constituents for for some feedback and some some reaction. Are we talking about next city, council, meeting early feds.

B

Up to us, that's up to us that's part of what the staff is asking yeah at this point. I think. Maybe we begin the conversation we begin to think about it, and perhaps we weigh in at the next city council meeting yeah to see where we are and how quickly.

H

We want to move on. This certainly I mean my only feedback in that case would be that I think another work session where the council can kind of liber8 amongst itself about what we think it needs to look like and then subsequent votes, maybe a week or two after that point. That makes sense. I.

D

Was just going to say that you know because summer spring summer fall is really the bulk waste season? We were thinking that if you made a sooner decision, we could educate people before service began expanded. But again we can do it at your leaders, but certainly will take that one combat. You know maybe another work session for the council to get into this more in depth. All.

B

The middle, our just.

G

One thing that the public seems to be men in our conversation has been missing is that we had planned to subsidize this in the current year and historically, we have been subsidizing this fun as far as I know forever.

G

At one point, we paid one hundred percent of it out of our property taxes, so am I, correct, er, well,.

D

G

What what was the the figure that we had planned to subsidize for last current year? Well,.

D

In the current year, we're still subsidizing the solid waste fund by about 1.2 million plus or minus right now we're looking at continuing that same amount of subsidy next year, barring any kind of change in decision, but we built that into these projections. So even with that current subsidy we're looking at ending this particular fund with a negative fund balance over 2 million dollars, then we face: do we take that money out of fun balance, reserve general fund balance reserve or how do we cover that huge deficit?

D

So that's you know what we're trying to come up with a financial game plan how to address that.

B

Ok, all right already! Thank you very much. We have oh I'm Diana, oh I'm, sorry so.

H

We have access to this online.

E

Yes, that's currently posted online right now on the city's website just and that's the most current copy. What you see now.

B

Ok, all right, Thank, You Steven! Thank you, Steve! Ok, thank you all right at this point. We do need to move on to Township. So do I have a motion to adjourn move by Ottoman black. Is there a second second by all the woman? Schmidt all the papers say the file by saying aye, okay, and then we will gather in about one minute for township. Thank you. I do see the Deb skill rooted here, someplace to and Steve gutter.